forTurf Show Times

July 3, 2018

Kent State graduate Nick Holley (Toledo, Ohio) recently signed a free
agent contract with the Los Angeles Rams. After proving his ability to
play multiple positions with the Golden Flashes, the Rams currently
have Holley listed as a running back.

In 10 career starts at quarterback, Holley had six 100-yard rushing
performances and 11 rushing touchdowns. Following the first four games
of the 2016 season, Holley was the top wide receiver for the Flashes,
before making the transition to quarterback.

From 2014 through the beginning of the 2015 season, Holley found
success as a running back with 649 rushing yards and six total
touchdowns over 14 games.

June 29, 2018

Apple has a team of cartographers on staff that work on more cultural,
regional and artistic levels to ensure that its Maps are readable,
recognizable and useful.

These teams have goals that are at once concrete and a bit out there —
in the best traditions of Apple pursuits that intersect the technical
with the artistic.

The maps need to be usable, but they also need to fulfill cognitive
goals on cultural levels that go beyond what any given user might know
they need. For instance, in the US, it is very common to have maps that
have a relatively low level of detail even at a medium zoom. In Japan,
however, the maps are absolutely packed with details at the same zoom,
because that increased information density is what is expected by users.

This is the department of details. They’ve reconstructed replicas of
hundreds of actual road signs to make sure that the shield on your
navigation screen matches the one you’re seeing on the highway road
sign. When it comes to public transport, Apple licensed all of the
type faces that you see on your favorite subway systems, like
Helvetica for NYC. And the line numbers are in the exact same order
that you’re going to see them on the platform signs.

These are the kind of details that I expect Apple to care about. Don’t be fooled though, the new Apple Maps is more that just some visual design tweaks and eye candy, there’s some serious rebuilding going on under the hood. This whole piece is a fascinating look into the project that’s going to see Apple attempt to build a whole stack Mapping solution that’ll rival Google’s.

forTurf Show Times

June 23, 2018

Taken by the Denver Broncos with the 251st overall pick of the 2015 NFL Draft, Los Angeles Rams CB Taurean Nixon didn’t initially win a spot on Denver’s active roster. He landed on the Broncos’ practice squad but was promoted to the active roster prior the AFC Championship game against the New England Patriots in January of 2016 but didn’t see any snaps for Defensive Coordinator Wade Phillips’ No-Fly Zone with CB Aqib Talib . While still a part of the roster for the Super Bowl 50 win over the Carolina Panthers, Nixon was one of the inactives for the game.

Bouncing around the roster and practice squad for 2016 before being waived in the summer of 2017, he played in two games and was credited with a single tackle.

June 3, 2018

Word broke last year that Sony was developing the superhero spinoff
based on the Spider-Man-adjacent characters Black Cat and Silver
Sable, and Sony announced that the film would hit theaters in
February 2019, just months after its other Spider-Man spinoff film,
Venom, would hit theaters. Now, Deadline reports that the film is
off the schedule completely, and is headed back into development.

This is for the best. Sony should ditch the “Spider-Man-adjacent” idea. They should sign a contract for all these “Spider-Man-adjacent” with Marvel and just cash in on the royalty checks every time Marvel brings out the money printer with new Spider-Man MCU movies.

June 3, 2018

I’m excited to announce that as of Tuesday of last week, I’m officially a contributor to Turf Show Times. I’m looking forward to adding my skills to that already talented group. Hopefully, I can put out some sweet, sweet content the rest of LA Rams community will be excited to read.

Horns Up!

June 1, 2018

Several N.F.L. teams determined cheerleading programs had a scarcity
problem on game days. If cheerleaders were on the sideline dancing,
none were available to serve as scantily clad hostesses who could
mingle with fans high up in the cheap seats or in the luxury suites,
where teams catered to big-money customers.

I don’t see this going well.

In interviews with a dozen women who have worked for N.F.L. teams as
noncheering cheerleaders and six others who had direct knowledge of
the noncheering squads, they described minimum-wage jobs in which
harassment and groping were common, particularly because the women
were required to be on the front lines of partying fans.

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

One of the worst parts of the day was the morning inspection.

Dennis Greene was head of business operations for the Redskins from
2007 until recently. He was ultimately in charge of the ambassador
program, and his job was to sell suites and keep the suiteholders
happy. He would have the ambassadors line up so he could examine them
and choose two to accompany him to suites during the game.

“He would look each of us up and down and say, I want that one and
that one, and everyone hates when you got selected for that,” a former
ambassador said of the lineups that occurred just a few years ago.
“It was humiliating, like we were cattle.”

This is disgusting, but this is only the latest in a few reports of harassment and abuse against cheerleaders in the NFL. It’s time for the NFL to scrap the cheerleader program which is designed to treat women as nothing more than sexual objects for its predominantly male audience. Will they do it? Probably not, because, you know, kneeling during the national anthem is a bigger issue than making sure women are treated with basic human decency. The NFL has their priorities in order for sure.

May 30, 2018

We set out to build Halide after trying every major camera app and
being left unsatisfied. We wanted an app for thoughtful, deliberate
photography, not selfies. We wanted a tactile experience that felt
like a high-end physical camera. We wanted the professional tools
you’d end on a DSLR.

We hoped others shared our experience. We hoped critics understood
what we were going for, and would forgive a few missing features. We
hoped the app economy wasn’t dead, and you could still make a few
bucks. […]

One year later we can say Halide has exceeded our wildest
expectations.

Halide is my camera app of choice. I know it’s built with professionals in mind, and there is definitely a lot of power packed into it, but even if you want a little more control than what the native app gives you, you could use automatic settings for what you don’t want to fiddle with. I’ve been blown away by how good it is and how much I’ve been able to learn by experimenting with different settings. Happy first year to Halide, and I hope it’s around for many more.

May 25, 2018

Suda said she felt uncomfortable and began recording the encounter
with her cellphone after they had moved into the parking lot. In the
video Suda recorded, she asks the agent why he is detaining them, and
he says it is specifically because he heard them speaking Spanish.

Suda, 37, was born in El Paso and raised across the border in Ciudad
Juárez, Mexico, but has spent much of her adult life moving around
the United States with her husband and young daughter. Hernandez is
originally from central California, Suda said.

Despite explaining this to the agent and showing him their IDs, Suda
said, he kept them in the parking lot for 35 to 40 minutes.

I honestly can’t tell you if the uptick in these types of incidents, like those involving black men and the police, or the recent slew of school shootings, is an actual increase in the raw number, or if the increased attention to them due to our current political climate is causing them to be reported on more often. But either way, this is reprehensible. The ACLU has already issued a statement on this incident, and I wholeheartedly agree, speaking Spanish, or any language that is not English should NOT be grounds for suspicion.

May 24, 2018

The mobile app, TeenSafe, bills itself as a “secure” monitoring app
for iOS and Android, which lets parents view their child’s text
messages and location, monitor who they’re calling and when, access
their web browsing history, and find out which apps they have
installed.[…]

But the Los Angeles, Calif.-based company left its servers, hosted on
Amazon’s cloud, unprotected and accessible by anyone without a
password. […]

The database stores the parent’s email address associated with
TeenSafe, as well as their corresponding child’s Apple ID email
address. It also includes the child’s device name — which is often
just their name — and their device’s unique identifier. The data
contains the plaintext passwords for the child’s Apple ID. Because the
app requires that two-factor authentication is turned off, a malicious
actor viewing this data only needs to use the credentials to break
into the child’s account to access their personal content data.

As was noted by John Gruber over at Daring Fireball, it seems like the app extracts it’s data from a device’s iCloud backups, which is why they require two-factor authentication turned off. Setting aside the discussion about whether an application / service like this is actually useful / necessary, if a company is going to ask you to trust them with your child’s personal information, I would hope they’d do better than storing the information in plaintext on a server without a password.

January 4, 2018

Ajit Pai was scheduled to appear at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on January 9 to speak and answer questions in a “candid conversation” about Federal Communications Commission policy-making. But Pai canceled his appearance, according to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which runs the CES conference.

If I were the head of the organization who decided they were going to take away Net Neutrality and whose reasons for doing so were shown to be false by their own report, I wouldn’t want to avail myself for questioning by people who strongly disagree with that decision either. As I’ve said before, no one likes being called out on their bullshit.

December 29, 2017

The Los Angeles Rams are finally good and exciting again. And the guess here is that a lot of you have probably typed “rams.com” in your search bar for the first time in recent weeks, which means you were probably surprised by what came up — a site about rams.

Not the Rams. Rams. The male sheep — the bighorn sheep, specifically — with those distinctive curved horns. And it is a pretty thorough website, too. There’s a helpful “About The RAMS” section (they recently migrated 1,800 miles west) and others that explored ram threats (probably Falcons, Panthers and Seahawks), ram behavior (suddenly assertive after years of acquiescence) and ram types, with surprisingly no mention of Todd Gurley or Aaron Donald or Jared Goff.

This guy has jokes. And I have in fact ended up at this website by mistake. Almost every time I want to go the therams.com I inevitably forget “the” and end up with a eye full of Rams.

December 24, 2017

A consumer sentiment report of early iPhone X adopters indicates that its TrueDepth camera is a “major driver among positive ratings,” and that the features it enables—including [Face ID] and Animoji—are key market differentiators driving interest in the high end phone

Face ID is the killer feature for me on the iPhone X. It makes so many interactions more natural when the authentication just happens rather than having to actively do something to make it happen. Touch ID is still great, but Face ID is definitely better.

December 21, 2017

Sen. Bob Corker, among Donald Trump’s most frequent Republican critics, said Thursday that he has developed a new empathy for the president’s “fake news” crusade against the media after reports swirled about a “Corker kickback” that some allege prompted the senator to change his vote on the White House-backed tax reform bill